Review: “Dog Songs: Poems,” by Mary Oliver

When I attended Baylor University in the 1980s, I had a brilliant professor named Ann Miller who assigned us a collection of poetry by Mary Oliver. The book was called “Dream Work,” and I have been reading Oliver’s poetry ever since. Oliver is big — a big seller, critically acclaimed, reviewed by the New York Times, mentioned frequently by Oprah, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

In a world full of modern and post-modern angst, she sees a place for the positive.

Her latest collection of new and favorite poems, “Dog Songs: Poems,” includes illustrations of dogs by John Burgoyne. The collection invites us to linger awhile in the pure happiness Oliver feels toward dogs, most notably, her beloved dog Percy, named after Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Oliver reminds us that dogs are a respite from the heaviness of adulthood: “We turn to making money,/ then we turn to the moral life/ … We meet wonderful people, but we lose them/ in our busyness./ We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.” What we can learn from dogs is “steadfastness,” which “is more about dogs than about us.”

Emerson, one of Oliver’s influences, argued that “nature is a symbol of the spirit.” Oliver sees much in dogs and the animal world worth interpreting. She writes poems about dogs who have died, dogs who have run away and dogs who have accompanied her to class when she taught others how to write poems. For Oliver, nature is our teacher and dogs some of the best professors.

In her essay, “Dog Talk,” which feels like a prose poem, Oliver reminds readers that “Some things are interchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote… I am tame, you are tame… But the dog lives in both worlds.”

The joy of seeing dogs romp, imagining what they would say and welcoming them back when they have run away are part of a larger connection with the wildness that seems far removed from our everyday lives. As Oliver argues, “… in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin [of wildness] that we can keep or restore.”

Doni M. Wilson teaches English at Houston Baptist University and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.